


i had a meltdown in the bathroom and all i got was this stupid paperwork

by fourshoesfrank



Series: autistic criminal minds [4]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Autistic Aaron Hotchner, Autistic David Rossi, Gen, Sensory Overload, Stimming, construction work, the primeval need to pace when ur overwhelmed, this is a vent fic, this is abt rossi tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-17
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:14:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22295395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourshoesfrank/pseuds/fourshoesfrank
Summary: When he goes back to the BAU, Rossi sees no reason to tell the team about the autism diagnosis he got while he was retired. They don’t need to know, because it certainly won’t affect his professional life. And it doesn’t.Until he has a shutdown in the office.
Relationships: David Rossi & Aaron Hotchner, David Rossi & Jennifer "JJ" Jareau
Series: autistic criminal minds [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1529216
Comments: 12
Kudos: 133





	i had a meltdown in the bathroom and all i got was this stupid paperwork

**Author's Note:**

> this is set in about season 5 or 6 i think
> 
> uh rossi speaks some italian in here (sensory overload makes me forget which language i’m speaking, so i put even more #relateablecontent in here) but i’m not fluent in italian so pls correct any mistakes i have. i’m proficient in spanish and i used wordreference.com and my grandpa to learn the italian words i didn’t know. 
> 
> enjoy!!

No one told David the sidewalk was going to be re-paved.

Of course, the sidewalk in question was across the street from the BAU offices, not right outside their windows, so it made sense that they wouldn’t have been notified. The din of jackhammers and sledgehammers and...other kinds of hammers wouldn’t bother most of the people in the building.

It sure as hell bothered Dave. He couldn’t get anything done with that racket going on outside. It felt like every time the jackhammer out there hit the pavement, it hit his brain at the same time. It felt like every time the jackhammering stopped, thousands of little needles bored into his ears in the form of a high-pitched ringing.

It wasn’t just the sounds that bothered Dave. He was bothered by the mere fact that he was bothered by a little construction going on near his place of work. And the noise? Hell, he’d heard worse after all his hunting and field work. He’d thought all that gunfire had desensitized his eardrums to stuff like this.

A small part of him, in the very back of his mind, was waving a big sign that said ‘Diagnosis!’ at him, but Dave ignored it. This wasn’t a good enough reason to bring up what he’d learned during his retirement. He doubted anything could happen that would make him share what had happened during those visits to his new doctor.

Dave kept his door closed and his blinds drawn tightly. It helped a little. There was no urgent case begging for his attention, and thank god for that, because he could hardly concentrate on the mountain of paperwork in front of him. He’d been at work for half an hour and barely filled out one page.

This was no good. He couldn’t stand another minute in this room, with its erratically flickering ceiling light and the window letting in all this noise and the goddamn squeaky air conditioner. It was getting on his nerves.

Dave took a deep breath, held it while he clenched his fists tightly for a few seconds, and let it out slowly. He barely heard himself do this.

_Let’s get this done. One page, then coffee. One more page, then one more coffee. Let’s do it in increments,_ the rational part of his brain suggested. Dave took another deep breath. He could hardly process his own thoughts, let alone read and comprehend words that someone else had typed up. Honestly, he should’ve turned his car around and called in sick the minute he saw those guys in the yellow vests outside the building this morning. He  knew nothing good would happen today, and look what had happened. Absolutely nothing good.

He could practically sense the team members out in the bullpen looking at him through the glass wall, radiating concern out of every pore in their bodies. Dave hated that wall. He felt exposed, vulnerable. It was not a feeling he wanted to experience, especially now.

It felt like his brain was full of static, like the screen that popped up whenever a TV couldn’t get a signal. The same colorful, gray-specked, constantly vibrating image was laid over Dave’s vision, obstructing his view of the paperwork and the people outside his office.

_Non ci vedo... Fuck._ Oh God, now his brain was confusing the languages. That was never a good sign. If only those construction workers would hurry the hell up!

_Noise_.  He wanted to go downstairs and yell at the crew to hurry up, make less noise, but Dave knew that his mouth would only let him say Italian words. Telling an all-American worker ‘Fate meno rumore’ wouldn’t do much good. One of the unfortunate side effects of...

Of _something_. Of a condition that he had been diagnosed with about four years before. Of something he didn’t need to name. He didn’t  _want_ to name.

He just needed ten quiet minutes to plug his ears, close his eyes, and collect himself. Compared to the rest of the work day, ten minutes was no time at all. If he could just grab ten minutes to himself, he’d be fine, ready to go, just peachy. The part of his brain that wrote the books tried to make a list of colloquialisms to tack onto the end of that thought, but Dave shut it down. He didn’t need that distracting him too.

He couldn’t think of a place to go to be alone. There was nowhere in the building that other people didn’t go, so there was nowhere that Dave was sure he could be alone. He sighed, fighting the urge to plug his ears with his fingers because he knew he would hurt himself if he did. He’d press too hard. That was the beauty of earplugs; they didn’t use excessive force to block out noise the way his own hands did.

Dave sighed once more and continued to stare at the paperwork. He looked at it, pointed his eyes in its direction, but his mind didn’t register it at all. His eyes wouldn’t focus, and his vision was still overlaid with that pesky TV static.

Goddamn noise. It shouldn’t have been bothering him, really.

After staring at the papers for another couple minutes (it could have been hours, seconds, or even days; time was a thick jelly and it was full of random slow spots), Dave decided to take a break. He stood and started walking towards the doors that would take him to the men’s room. A quick sit-down would give him enough time to figure out how he was supposed to function at work for the rest of the day. Just ten minutes, that was all he needed, really.

Ten minutes was  _not_ long enough. Dave had been alone in the bathroom the entire time, furiously wiggling his fingers and pacing up and down the length of the room, and he was no better off than when he’d started.

_Merda_ . He couldn’t go back to his office like this. He just couldn’t. That would mean walking through the halls with their bright fluorescent lights that buzzed and flickered and it would mean hearing the sound of the construction even through the closed windows and it would mean making eye contact with poeple as they passed him and forcing a smile in greeting and those were all things that he  _ could not  _ _do_.  Dave didn’t know how to fix this.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the restroom door opening. Dave panicked and dashed into one of the stalls before the intruder could see him.

Intruder? That was a harsh word, but it was the one that Dave’s brain had supplied him with. He sat down on the toilet and took a deep breath, mentally cursing at the intruder to  _finish up and leave already_ _._ This didn’t do much of anything, but it felt good to cuss somebody out, even if it was only mentally.

Dave counted to sixty before he exited the stall. He turned towards the door, ready (but not really) to exit the restroom and brave the hostile sounds of his office once again, but he stopped in his tracks when he saw who had just entered the bathroom.

Aaron Hotchner was standing by the sinks, washing his hands slowly with his head cocked in Dave’s direction, likely watching the stalls to see who would come out of them. Hotch nodded at Dave in greeting, a gesture that Dave couldn’t find it in himself to return. His neck wouldn’t cooperate with him.

Dave made a flat humming noise instead. Hotch smiled when he heard it; that was good, that meant that Dave had successfully reciprocated his greeting. Now all Dave had to do was fumble his way through anything else Hotch said to him.

“Construction’s pretty bad, huh?”

Dave‘s eyes flicked in Hotch’s general direction as he tried to think of a way to answer, without giving away just his shitty he felt. His brain was only supplying him with a colorful repertoire of Italian curse words, nothing useful. Nothing he could say to his boss.

“Dave.” Hotch’s voice was different now, more... more hard. _Harder_. But not hard in the sense of rigidity or stiffness, hard in the sense of forceful, commanding. Dave found that he didn’t mind the commanding voice just now.

The problem was that he knew exactly what Hotch was commanding him to do, and he couldn’t do it. Hotch wanted him to form an original sentence in response to the primary question, and Dave’s brain wasn’t about to let that happen. He had to say  something , though.

“Construction,” Dave echoed, feeling the flush of embarrassment already creeping across his face. He cleared his throat and added, “Construction’s pretty bad.”

Hotch nodded. “Is it bothering you?”

_Shit_ , he was good. Dave regretted ever teaching him that intra-team profiling was acceptable. If Hotch just hadn’t learned Dave’s tells, the ones that alerted everyone with eyes and a brain to his... his  _condition_ , then this conversation in the men’s room wouldn’t have been happening. Dave so dearly wished that he’d been a little less thorough with Hotch’s training.

“Bothering you,” Dave muttered to himself. “Yes,” he answered, nodding emphatically. At this point, there was really no point in hiding it any longer. Denying his distress would have been a mere formality, a facade that Hotch would’ve been able to penetrate effortlessly with his eagle eyes.

Hotch nodded. “You can leave, you know,” he said. “The paperwork will be just as boring over there.”

“Boring paperwork.” Dave agreed, feeling his face crack into a smile for the first time that day. He huffed, his attempt at a laugh in response to Hotch’s joke. At least, he thought it was a joke. It was funny like one.

Hotch reached for Dave’s shoulder to pat him on the back, the way he might with Morgan or Reid, but he hesitated before making contact. Dave was grateful for that half a second of pausing. It gave him time to prepare himself for the touch of another person, something that always made him worse when he was like this. He smiled in Hotch’s general direction, dropping his eyes to the floor once again.

“Take it easy, Dave,” Hotch said to him as he exited the restroom. Dave sighed and resumed his pacing in the now-empty room. His hands reached for his collar and tugged at it once, twice, trying to loosen the fabric and make it more comfortable. He was going to be wearing it until noon, after all. He decided to work in the office until noon, his lunch hour. After lunch, he would spout something about car trouble and drive home, away from all the noise.

It was a solid plan. Dave had used variations of it before, when everything got to be too much. He just had to make it to noon.

After completing one more circuit of the bathroom, Dave forced himself to brave the office once more. He took out his phone as he walked and scrolled through some old emails in an attempt to look busy and unapproachable. It must have worked, because he reached the BAU office with no trouble at all beyond the extra noise he’d started to hear the moment he stepped out of the men’s room.

Dave high-tailed it back to his office and sat down at his desk with a sigh. He checked the clock; it was ten forty-five. He could do this.

He was in the middle of rooting around in his drawers for a pen to write with when the small black pair of headphones on top of his desk caught his eye. Dave abandoned the pens for the moment and picked the headphones up instead. He examined them, trying to figure out who could have accidentally left them in his office.

A movement caught his eye from the bullpen. It was JJ waving her arms semi-discreetly at him, trying to get his attention. When she saw that he had Dave’s attention, she gave him a thumbs-up and mimed putting something on her head, like earmuffs or a hat or... headphones.

Dave gave JJ a nod of acknowledgement and watched her walk away. He turned the headphones upside down, looking for a certain label.

Ah, there it was.  _Noise-cancelling headphones. Block nearly all sounds detectable by the human ear._ Dave slipped them on and sighed in relief as all the sounds he’d been subjected to since he arrived that morning faded away to be replaced by nothing but the faint ringing in his ears. It was  _bliss_ . 

**Author's Note:**

> hope y’all liked it!! pls leave a comment and/or kudos u gremlins i love receiving feedback


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